1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to collection information management servers and collection information management methods, and more specifically to a collection information management server, a collection information management method, a storage medium, and a program for unitarily managing collection of used office machines or products related to the office machines.
2. Description of the Related Art
Office machines such as copying machines, facsimile machines, and printers are widely used. Consumable products used in the office machines, for example, toner, are often supplied in a form encapsulated in cartridges. The cartridges are sometimes used, in addition to serving as containers of toner, etc., as components in which consumable products such as photosensitive drums, developing devices, and cleaning members are incorporated, and sometimes used only to contain toner, etc. The consumable products are either discarded or recovered in some way after use.
Consumable products to be recovered include, in addition to cartridges, toner bottles and photosensitive drums for copying machines, ink containers, cartridges, and print heads for ink-jet printers, other types of service parts, and paper and OHP sheets. Furthermore, office machines such as printers, copying machines, scanners, facsimile machines themselves may also be recovered. In the following description, products to be recovered will be simply referred to as “consumable products.”
The consumable products described above are usually manufactured or recycled (hereinafter referred to as “supply”) by manufactures or dealers of office machines in which the consumable products are used.
Suppliers of the consumable products, including manufacturers and dealers, individually recover used consumable products and recycle the consumable products that have been recovered. That is, the consumable products are recovered by manufacturers, dealers, etc. of the consumable products (hereinafter referred to as recovery agents). Some manufacturers recycle and sell cartridges manufactured by another manufacturer.
In a known system, users of the consumable products request recovery of used consumable products via phone or facsimile.
However, in that system, when a user requests recovery of different types of consumable products, the user must request recovery to a plurality of recovery agents by methods respectively specified by the plurality of recovery agents, which is laborious for the user.
Furthermore, from the perspective of a recovery agent, which recovers used consumable products based on requests from users, users that request recovery are not always concentrated in a specific area as is convenient for the recovery agent. If the users that request recovery are geographically distributed, the recovery agent must recover products from a large area by trucks only for a small number of users. This raises recovery cost, and leads to emission of environmental pollutants associated with transportation by trucks, such as CO2, NOx, and SOx.